Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

barely sit up. I couldn’t help but recognize the fact that if it had been anyone other than Augie at the foot of my couch, I would have been deep in some serious shit right now.
    “What are you doing?” I muttered.
    “I came to check up on you. How are you feeling?”
    I shrugged. “You?”
    He nodded toward the bottle of Beam on the coffee table. “I might feel a little better if I had some of that.”
    “I thought Frank didn’t hire drinkers.”
    Augie smiled slyly. “It’ll be our secret.”
    “Help yourself.”
    He poured a few inches of amber into my glass, then picked it up by the rim. Holding it between his thick index and middle fingers, he downed its contents in two gulps.
    He placed the glass back on the table and said, “You heard that a cop bought it tonight.”
    “Yeah.”
    Augie looked around my disheveled living room, then reached into his field jacket and removed an envelope. He dropped it on the coffee table beside the bottle of Beam. It landed with a solid smack.
    I looked at it, then up at him. “What’s that?”
    “It’s from Frank. He said to tell you he doesn’t normally pay in cash, but he thought you might not have a bank account. You that far off the grid that you don’t have a bank?”
    “I have a bank. I just have nothing in it.” I didn’t take my eyes off the envelope.
    “I’ll give one thing to Frank,” Augie said. “He takes care of his men. He paid both our hospital tabs, and he’s over at Village Hall right now telling the Chief to instruct his boys to cut you some slack, that you’re working for him now.”
    Augie was looking around my living room again as he said this. The curtains on my three front windows were ratty and smoke-stained, the hardwood floor splintered and dusty. The coffee table on which the money and the Beam sat wobbled like a game horse. He nodded at what he saw, as though it made some sense to him.
    “You like living like this?” he said.
    “I don’t really think about it.”
    Augie nodded again. “So, tell me, why are the cops not all that fond of you? I’ve heard some talk. But I’d like to hear your side.”
    “I guess I made them look bad on occasion.”
    “How?”
    “I found a few people they couldn’t.”
    “You’re good at that? Finding people?”
    I shrugged. “Just lucky. And maybe I looked a little harder than they did. The people who come to me for help are usually on the wrong end of the tax bracket, if you know what I mean.”
    “Things still like that here?”
    “You’re from Southampton?”
    “I left thirty years ago. I haven’t been back for all that long.” He paused. “So is it still like that here?”
    “It depends who you’re talking to. It seems like that for some people.”
    “Let me ask you, Mac, do you think the chief of police is on the take?”
    “I don’t have any proof. And if I did, what could I do about it.”
    “Frank seems to think he can do something about it.”
    “Is that why you work for him? The two of you going to clean the place up.”
    Augie didn’t answer. I looked at the bottle on my table, and the empty glass beside it.
    “If you want a drink, pour yourself one,” he said. “Don’t be shy because I’m here.”
    When I didn’t make a move for the bottle, he leaned down and pushed the glass toward me. I thought about it for a moment, then poured myself a few inches. I downed the bourbon in slower gulps than Augie had, then placed the emptied glass by the envelope of money.
    “It’s amazing what gossip gets around, the things you hear,” Augie said. He was looking at my scratches. “For example, I’ve started asking around about you, and there’s more than one story on how you got those.”
    I said nothing.
    “It’s even more amazing what doesn’t get around,” Augie continued. “The secrets some people manage to keep while others aren’t so lucky. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, as far as I can see. It’s a random thing, like sunken treasure from some ship lost at sea centuries ago. For every treasure chest found, there’s maybe hundreds that go unrecovered.”
    He watched me for a moment. I pretended that I had no idea what he was talking about, but of course I did.
    Frank Gannon had secrets. Augie had secrets. And Augie knew now that I had secrets, too. A past I had run from—and, for that matter, a present that I would run from, if only that were possible.
    “Maybe that’s the wrong analogy,” Augie said. “Maybe you